Essential Data Storage Tips to Protect Your Business

Updated 11:13 am, Thursday, June 13, 2013

Storage in the cloud helps guarantee protection for important business data because a good cloud host will implement standard disaster recovery, which includes the maintenance, backups and security needed to recover business data in the event of an emergency. That said, the website or company IT manager and administrator should be well-versed in good good cloud storage practices, even if the host manages most of the process.

Here are some helpful tips to help ensure that your business data is protected while storing in the cloud.

Backups

An important lifeline in disaster recovery is backup storage space. A full image backup uses several gigabytes of space, containing all the applications and personal and operating system files used on the server for recovery.

Backups are the single most valuable storage strategy for any online business. Backups are used if the database server fails, data is changed and must be recovered, or a hack occurs. A full backup stores the entire database, but incremental backups are also used to store only the data that has changed. Recovery can be made using backup styles, which are stored for several months in a safe location.

Maintenance

All good data storage requires scheduled maintenance. Maintenance keeps performance at its peak and prevents data files from fragmenting. Defragmenting data storage files and archiving old, unneeded data organizes the data as well. For production tables, if old data is not needed and tables contain several million records, the database administrator can archive the old data to a separate database, which will speed up querying.

Separate Reporting and Production Data

Businesses need reports, and they usually require them daily. However, running reports on the main production server can greatly harm application performance. Database administrators can create a separate database from the main database and import the production data nightly. This allows users to generate any number of reports without affecting the main applications, such as backend customer management applications and web applications.

Run Queries on Development Servers First

Even in emergencies, any queries run on the production server should first be tested with development data. A bad query can lead to complete data corruption. It is best to run queries in development, verify the data and then run the query in production to fix any emergency issues. Running queries that return large data sets can also harm overall performance, so it is better to run these queries during off-hours.

Create Intermittent Full Image Backups

Full image backups are a mirrored copy of the hard drive running in production. For new servers, always create a full image backup of all the data and store it in the cloud. Using the cloud, the image is available anywhere, but what is even more useful is if the business needs a new server set up. After a server is built, the backup image can be used to install all applications and software on the new hard drive. With full image backups, there is no need to install software and setup server settings. These files and settings are restored with the image, saving the administrator hours of configuration time.

Also, the business has a way to replicate one server to several servers in a reduced time period.

With cloud hosting, most of these tips are covered by the host. Check with your hosting provider to ensure these backups and maintenance are a part of the contract. Most host providers will help with any issues related to data storage as part of support, so turn to them if you run into issues.